Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s by Marc Dollinger (review)

Marc Dollinger offers a highly detailed, engrossing depiction of the responses of major Jewish organizations to the Civil Rights Movement (CRM) and to the varied government and public policy understandings of racism and proposals for remediation. Support for the CRM from individual Jews and rabbis is well known; Jews are white America's most liberal and progressive ethnic group, viewing American social life "through a group-based lens" (79). Yet by examining the positions of major Jewish organizations, this book reconfigures the standard narrative in crucial ways and makes an important contribution to Jewish cultural and political history.

Dollinger focuses on the national level, with little attention to regional differences, and traces a sort of "big macher" history—that is, he is attentive primarily to the leaders of major Jewish organizations and less so to grassroots groups (for instance, New Jewish Agenda), religious groups (rabbinical associations, lay organizations), or individual voices of prominent Jewish intellectuals (such as Hannah Arendt). Rabbinical sermons are occasionally quoted, but not in a systematic way. That Rabbi Dov Peretz Elkins used his Yom Kippur sermon in 1967 at the highly distinguished Conservative Har Zion Temple in well-heeled suburban Philadelphia to speak in support of affirmative action is dramatic and important; one wonders how the congregation reacted and whether such a sermon could have been given elsewhere in the United States or even just a few years later—or by an Orthodox rabbi. Indeed, the religious divisions within the Jewish community were exacerbated by American politics. Even as Orthodox rabbis were among those who marched in Selma, Orthodox Jews began to turn increasingly to rightwing politics during this era.

The central argument is Dollinger's challenge of the widespread belief that the Black Power Movement caused the breakup of the Black-Jewish coalition in the mid-1960s. Instead, he sees a "tentative, fractious, and complex relationship" already in the 1950s. Rather than a miserable breakup of a relationship, he argues that Black Power actually stimulated the rise of Jewish identity politics, a reinvigoration that was good for the Jews. But the biggest innovation of his book is the claim that Jewish leaders anticipated the split and supported it "as a tool to inspire greater Jewish activism" (16). This was the era of the rise of ethnicities in the United States, so that "Jews became more American by acting more Jewish" (17). This was also the era of the beginning of the end of liberalism and the rise of the politics of resentment among white segregationists, as Dan Carter argues in his biography of George Wallace.

Religion played a central role in the CRM. The Bible, especially the Hebrew prophets and the Exodus story, was quoted in speeches, which were often delivered in Black churches, and hymns were sung at marches and in prison. The centrality of the Hebrew Bible over the New Testament was an important factor encouraging Jewish participation. By contrast, Black Power was a radical rejection of religion as well as of the CRM. Dollinger describes the awkward difficulties of Jewish leaders trying to respond to the rise of Black liberation, but perhaps most surprising in the book is Dollinger's account of early American Jewish support for Black Power activists. Yet that may not be about Black-Jewish relations as much as about the right-wing shift of Jewish leaders. What developed during the 1960s signals the ongoing difficulty such Jewish leaders continue to have in responding to left-wing politics more generally, whether leftist criticisms of Israeli government policies, especially after 1967, or progressive Democrats running for elected office in 2018.

There are moments of understandable cynicism in Dollinger's account (89). He points to American Jewish recognition of the institutionalized racism in the United States, and to Jewish leaders who scolded Jews for their complacent white suburban communities that began even before the Selma march of 1965 (93). He also calls attention to Jewish leaders...